Network Monitoring
Network monitoring is the practice of continuously observing and analyzing network traffic, performance, and health to ensure reliability, security, and efficiency. It involves collecting data from network devices like routers, switches, and servers using protocols such as SNMP, NetFlow, or packet capture. The goal is to detect issues, optimize performance, and maintain security by identifying anomalies, bottlenecks, or threats in real-time.
Developers should learn network monitoring to troubleshoot application performance issues, ensure service availability, and enhance security in distributed systems. It is crucial for DevOps and SRE roles to maintain uptime, debug network-related bugs, and comply with SLAs in cloud or on-premise environments. Specific use cases include monitoring API latency, detecting DDoS attacks, and optimizing database query performance over networks.